Chapter Eight: The Debt

The image of a shackled slave praying appeared in Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Daniel P. Mannix.

The image of a shackled slave praying appeared in Black Cargoes: A History of the Atlantic Slave Trade by Daniel P. Mannix. (Josiah Wedgewood and Sons)

MATTHEW KAUFFMAN

James Forman stepped into The Riverside Church in Harlem clutching a cane in one hand and a copy of his "Black Manifesto" in the other. It was May 4, 1969, and the mostly white congregation - 1,500 voices strong - was singing the Sunday service's opening hymn, "When Morning Gilds the Skies."

As the final strains of the church organ faded, Forman made his move, climbing the six chancel steps, turning around to face the stunned congregation and issuing his demands in a slow and forceful voice.

The veteran civil rights activist wanted $500 million from religious institutions for the mistreatment of blacks during and since slavery, as well as free office space for his organization, including unlimited long-distance telephone calls.

He gave the church a week to come up with a suitable down payment.

Forman got his picture in the papers the next day, but he didn't get much more. His critics - far more focused on his tactics than his message - denounced the demonstration as an act of "intimidation," "invasion" and "blackmail." In time, Forman moved on to other battle fronts. The media moved on to other stories. And the concept of reparations slipped from the nation's conscience.

For more than 100 years that has been the fate of those who have pondered whether African Americans - past, present or both - are owed compensation for the horror and the legacy of slavery.

It's an idea dating at least to the closing days of the Civil War, when freed slaves were offered - and then denied - the iconic 40 acres and a mule. But for most of its history, the idea of reparations for black Americans has been perceived as a quest that spanned only that limited portion of the political spectrum between the radical fringe and the lunatic fringe.

Not anymore.

The reparations movement - and only of late has it grown to something that could fairly be called a movement - is suddenly a hot and serious topic from barbershops to university classrooms to the Capitol dome to that most inescapable of forums: the federal courthouse.

Earlier this year, a group of high-profile lawyers sued Aetna Inc., FleetBoston Financial Corp. and railroad giant CSX Corp., seeking profits the companies allegedly earned from their participation - or, at least, complicity - in the slave trade. Aetna endorsed the concept of human bondage by selling plantation owners insurance policies covering slaves. Fleet Bank took over Providence Bank, which financed slave-trading expeditions. And CSX was sued because predecessor railroad lines were "constructed or run, at least in part, by slave labor."

Similar lawsuits in the past garnered mostly snickers. This one was front-page news.

A second salvo was fired earlier this month, when suits were brought against a variety of tobacco, textile, railroad and financial-services companies. The defendants are not the only companies entwined in slavery, which was the law in much of the land until 1865. But just as the lawsuit is partly symbolic, so are the companies, standing for an endless roster of firms, North and South, dirtied by slavery.

Paying for sins of the past

Proponents of reparations look at America - from George Washington to Jonathan Trumbull, from the textile barons to the ivory cutters, from Yale University to The Hartford Courant - and see a land whose individuals, industries and institutions got rich off the exploited labor of their kidnapped ancestors.

Now, they say, it's payback time.

Even as public sentiment seems to turn against decades of affirmative action, the reparations question has curiously elbowed its way out of the shadows and struck a chord with mainstream black America.

Studies suggest that about two-thirds of blacks favor reparations in some form while, in another stark example of the yawning racial divide in this country, nearly 90 percent of whites oppose them.

Even proponents of reparations lack unanimity, with vastly different arguments, approaches and solutions. Some want a recommitment to education and employment programs for blacks. Some want a slave museum and an airing of the nation's complicity in the slave trade and the repression of black advancement. Others want money, measuring the debt in the millions, billions, even trillions of dollars.

But virtually all agree that simply provoking a debate on the merits of reparations will help the country, if not to come to terms with, then at least to face a shameful past.

"There is much fessing-up that white society must be induced to do here for the common good," writes Randall Robinson in "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," the closest thing the movement has to a present-day manifesto. "First, it must own up to slavery and acknowledge its debt to slavery's contemporary victims. It must, at long last, pay that debt in massive restitutions made to America's only involuntary members."

To critics, it all seems hopelessly stuck in the past. To them, slavery is remote, a misdeed from another time committed by long-dead perpetrators on long-dead victims; its sins washed away by decades and generations, with no one left to blame and no one left to make whole.

But Robinson and others see a clear line from the shackles of 19th century slavery to 21st century poverty and ghettoization. They say the racial gap in income, mortality, educational opportunity and incarceration is evidence of a debt that remains unpaid.

The continuing slave toll

While the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in 1865, blacks were treated by law as second-class citizens for most of the next century - deprived of political power, denied quality schooling and excluded from the suburban housing boom. Slaves may have helped build the nation - serving as currency in the Triangle Trade and working vast plantations as close by as Salem and Colchester - but government-sanctioned racism prevented generations of free blacks from sharing the wealth.

In their 1995 book "Black Wealth/White Wealth," professors Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro calculate that discrimination in housing markets will cost the current generation of black Americans $82 billion, mostly in lost home equity. Unabated, that discrimination will cost the next generation $93 billion, they say.

For most whites, there is a disconnect between slavery and the present. But the wounds are fresh for many blacks. "We are owed for 500 years of terrorism," Illinois State Sen. Donne Trotter said at a reparations rally last month in Washington, D.C. "We want to be paid and we want to be paid now."

That perspective explains why supporters of reparations have been energized by cash payments given over the past 20 years to Jews enslaved during the Holocaust and to Japanese Americans interned during World War II.

Opponents point out a critical and obvious distinction: Those reparations were generally paid to actual victims, not to their distant descendants. But supporters say that misses the point. Blacks living in America today, they say, are the victims of slavery.

"The great-great-great-great-grandchildren of slaves," Robinson writes, "are owed not just for their forebears' labor, or for the humiliation of performing it, but for every devastating failure since, engendered by their government on the basis of race."

Getting skeptical whites - and blacks - to accept that social problems today are the direct legacy of slavery will be key to building broad support for reparations.

It would seem an impossible task, but there has been progress. Several prominent civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Coretta Scott King, have expressed support for reparations, as have politicians in a dozen cities, where resolutions have passed supporting a congressional study of reparations.

Chapters of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America - N'COBRA - have sprung up around the country. Last month's Millions for Reparations rally in Washington, although much smaller than organizers had hoped, was nevertheless a milestone.

The haves and have nots

Still, even those inclined to see a lasting debt to black America are often stymied by a tricky question: Who would pay, and who would benefit?

Is a debt owed by whites whose immigrant ancestors arrived in the United States decades after slavery ended, facing poverty and discrimination of their own?

Do the descendants of the Union Army soldiers who fought and died to defeat the Confederacy owe reparations?

What about Latinos or Asians or gays or women, who have all been harmed by discrimination? Should they pay?

And would mixed-race Americans pay reparations, or receive them?

Supporters of reparations say they aren't looking to heap blame on individuals. Instead, they are seeking reparations from the entire society, through the government, for lingering injustices.

It was the U.S. government that paid money to Japanese Americans, not the individual internment-camp guards. And the tax money came from all Americans, including, of course, Japanese Americans.

At the same time, Robinson notes that white Americans have profited from their skin color, regardless of their ancestry or their utter lack of culpability for slavery.

"No, it isn't you," he writes, "but you are the beneficiary of the accumulation of wealth gained at someone else's expense and suffering. Or you are the beneficiary of discriminatory practices that favored one race over another."

White immigrants might be free of the stain of slavery, but they also might have faced fewer barriers in education, employment and housing - the cornerstones of wealth in America.

Nevertheless, the question of reparations inevitably stumbles on the emotionally loaded question of who is to blame and who owes an apology.

At last month's reparations rally in Washington, the official chant was "They owe us!" and it wasn't hard to figure out who "they" were.

At the same time, the New Black Panther Party hawked "Kill Whitey" T-shirts. And Charles Barron, a New York City council member, let loose the bizarre line: "I want to go up to the closest white person and say, `You can't understand this, it's a black thing,' and then slap him, just for my mental health."

Some saw the whole affair as a divisive effort to guilt-trip white Americans. And they resist even an apology for slavery - as President Clinton considered offering.

In 1997, Clinton apologized for the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study in which scientists intentionally withheld treatment from hundreds of poor black sharecroppers over four decades to study the effects of the disease. Two years earlier, he apologized for human radiation tests. And in recent years, the Southern Baptist Convention has apologized for its history of racism, the Pope has apologized for the Catholic Church's past treatment of Jews and blacks, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair apologized for the potato famine.

But Clinton stopped short of an apology for slavery, and many in the United States resist the idea, saying no one alive today has anything to apologize for.

Denying America's history

While many whites are comfortable distancing themselves from slavery and its ill effects, many blacks see white America as deeply in denial about the nation's treatment of blacks.

The U.S. Capitol was built with slave labor, but you won't find a plaque recognizing the slaves' contribution. Eight of the first 12 presidents owned slaves, but our reverence for them is little diminished. The National Statuary Hall in the Capitol houses life-sized bronze statues of Confederate leaders Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, and the powerful in Congress are willing to see them as local heroes, rather than traitors to the United States.

That's why Robinson says whites have some fessing up to do, including an apology, in both words and reparations.

But reparations for whom?

Beyond the jokes that a reparations fund would have lily white Americans scouring genealogical records for their African roots, there are more serious discussions about who ought to benefit from reparations. Is Michael Jordan due money? Is Oprah Winfrey?

Opponents and even many supporters of reparations bristle at the thought of millions of checks dropped in the mail to every African American, although some are warm to the idea of a tax cut for blacks (offset, perhaps, by an increase in the inheritance tax). But most supporters - including the individual plaintiffs in the corporate lawsuits - favor the establishment of a fund that would be used to assist African Americans most injured by the legacy of slavery.

Some want money for housing, school construction, new jobs, college tuition or medical care. Others suggest allocating land, giving to black charities or setting money aside for a slavery museum on the scale of the recently built Holocaust museum in Washington. Still others take a global view and propose reparations for African nations, typically in the form of debt forgiveness.

So how much? It's a question many supporters avoid, because it's sure to overwhelm any discussion on the merits of reparations. U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan has tried for 13 years to get Congress to consider his bill to study reparations. But he has offered no specifics, saying, "to rush forward with suggestions at this point would only further divide us."

Putting a price tag on slavery is an exercise in intellectual fancy, with an unlimited number of plausible answers. Some would update Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's offer in 1865 to provide freed slaves with 40 acres and a mule. (President Andrew Johnson overruled Sherman later that year and ordered the confiscated land returned to its Confederate owners.) Take their value in 1865, add 137 years' interest, multiply by 4 million slaves and, according to the Progressive Labor Party, you get a bill for $6.55 trillion - a number higher than the national debt.

Others look to the value of unpaid slave labor, putting the figure, including interest, at anywhere from $2 trillion to $12 trillion.

The numbers abound: $100,000 a head, $275,000 a head, $100 billion in tax credits. In an essay in "The Wealth of Races," economist Robert Browne writes that the goal of reparations should be to "restore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination."

An honorable goal, but how would one calculate that?

The growing racial divide

To some, the reparations movement ignores the progress blacks have made since the end of slavery and dismisses governmental efforts to narrow the socioeconomic racial gap. Federal and state governments have enforced civil rights legislation, promoted minority scholarships and spent billions on welfare, low-income housing programs and initiatives to spur minority-owned businesses.

"For almost 40 years," writes James McWhorter, an African American commentator who opposes reparations, "America has been granting blacks what any outside observer would rightly call reparations."

Willie Gary, one of the lawyers in the suit against the corporations, was one of 11 children born to migrant farmers. Now a hugely successful Florida lawyer, Gary owns a Boeing 737 and parks his-and-her Rolls Royces in the garage of his home.

The biography on his website opens with this stark assessment: "Willie E. Gary lives the American Dream."

But the Willie Garys aside, supporters of reparations say that whatever the nation has done in the past 40 years, it hasn't been nearly enough for the great majority of African Americans. Indeed, the revival of the reparations debate reflects a frustration that nearly four decades after the civil rights heyday, there hasn't been more progress in lifting the black underclass.

Ten years ago, black students in Connecticut who took the SAT lagged behind white students by an average of 199 points. In the decade since, average scores for blacks have actually fallen, with the gap increasing to 226 points.

"We saw the gaps narrowing 15 to 20 years ago," said Brian O'Reilly, executive director of the College Board. "But for the past several years, they have widened again."

But even some who grow impatient with that wait are unsure about reparations, saying any race-based initiative is a setback for those who strive for a colorblind society. Some also say the reparations movement promotes black victimization and fosters the notion that blacks are somehow psychically defective and must be rescued by whites.

Still others say reparations would backfire because whites would see it as settling the score on the nation's racial divide, forever eliminating the need for laws or programs to help minorities.

A few note that African Americans have the highest standard of living of any nation's black population. Conservative thinker Dinesh D'Souza writes that if the slave trade had not transplanted their family trees on these shores, modern-day blacks would probably be in worse shape in Africa than in America.

His critics say that if that's true, it is only because slavery robbed Africa of its most able citizens, hobbling the continent's cultural and economic development for centuries. African nations, they say, are also the victims of the slave trade, owed trillions in reparations from the West.

One side says it was blacks in Africa who turned over their shackled countrymen to slave traders on the shore. The other side says it was only the greedy businessmen in the United States and Britain who made the trade so irresistibly profitable.

And the finger-pointing continues.

But that sort of back-and-forth leaves supporters of reparations undaunted. Some, in fact, are heartened, because any discussion of the drawbacks of reparations necessarily sparks a debate on its merits as well.

Most just want to get the discussion going. And if there is any disappointment, it is that the debate has taken so long to flourish.

More than 130 years ago, U.S. Rep. Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania pressed for legislation that would give land and money to freed slaves, saying blacks were doomed without an economic base from which to prosper.

"I must earnestly pray that this may not be defeated," he said. "On its success, in my judgment, depends not only the happiness and respectability of the colored race, but their very existence."

Few were listening, despite Stevens' prediction that a refusal to act would hang over the nation as a curse for generations to come.

"If we fail in this great duty now, when we have the power," Stevens warned his colleagues, to no avail, "we shall deserve and receive the execration of history and of all future ages."